Have been working on my Grafana dashboard recently and am thinking about what else I could add. So far, I have:

• CPU usage and temperature
• Memory usage
• Network usage
• Backrest daily backup status
• SMART status of drives
• CPU and memory usage of containers

Anything else that you find useful? I have a few other ideas, but am curious what others have up. Is everything on one scrollable dashboard, or do you have it organized across multiple?

I have the homepage widget. Basic but does the job of CPU, memory, and storage.

I mean, I got the whole set of default dashboards, some for networking and one each for backups (k8up) and Postgres (CloudNativePG), but I don't look at them often, usually only if something's wrong. I also have logs available via Grafana, but I don't have any dashboards for that, I just query what I need.
If I ever have enough time and motivation, some things I'd put on a kind of overview dashboard would be in addition to your list:

• zpool health (scrub status, IO etc.)
• list of crashing pods
• list of warnings from FluxCD (e.g. application upgrade failures or invalid manifests)
• list of failing persistent volumes
  

I enabled docker integration by passing docker.sock to the hompage container to see per services memory usage. Nice for spotting memory hogs.

Right now I'm just using it for an AirGradient dashboard, which is an open hardware / open software air quality monitor. I used claude to rewrite the firmware to send the data to prometheus instead if their own servers, and countless other frustrating changes because they make the whole operation dependent on a connection to their servers...anyway, I didn't want to pay a subscription for something so simple. I've thought about using it for some other projects, but for a lot of stuff I just don't see the need for a dedicated dash.

I have a series of Tasmota esp32's with Temp/Humidity/Barometric Pressure sensors around the house, attic, garage and outside. I scrape it into influxdb and have a Grafana dashboard setup.

I forgot to look into that! I use glance for my homepage now, and I think they have a Grafana community widget that I could take a look at. I have a bunch of bookmarks of community widgets that I need to look at lol

Definitely something to add to the list, environment monitoring sounds like fun

I think aggregating logs would be a good choice, yeah. My homelab is distributed across 5 machines, so it's been getting a little unruly to ssh into them all the time. I actually haven't taken a look at premade dashboards - completely forgot those exist. I've just been writing the PromQL by hand to learn how it all works before adding premade things

How much does each sensor wind up costing, esp32 and all? That sounds really interesting. I think I have an esp32 laying around that I haven't gotten to playing with yet.

• Uptime
• Days since last system update
• Days since last CVE scan

I found a pack of 5 on Amazon for $20, for each of the sensors and the esp32's... so $40 for 5. Probably cheaper in Ali or similar. The only negative is they need some calibration. The ones from Adafruit are better quality and already calibrated, but much more expensive.

I think it's pretty cool in beszel you can set it up using docker so easily and pass the disks through for SMART monitoring and not have to have an extra solution.

Ah, those are good ones. I'm a little too neglectful with updates, haha.

Other than the items you mentioned I have dashboards for:

• SSH/SMTP honeypot
• Jellyfin
• Pihole
• Torrents
• Tasmota (smart plugs)

Thats really cool.

Is there any reason you chose grafana over home assistant?

I'm just setting uo a similar system myself, but I never even had the idea to use grafana for it

Beszel is really cool! I was actually planning to set that up at first, but I really wanted to learn Grafana / Prometheus and have the flexibility to customize things how I wanted. That's definitely my biggest annoyance with using Grafana - I have five machines setup, and each one has 3 containers for monitoring (cAdvisor, smartctl_exporter, node_exporter), so it got pretty tiring to put up so many containers.

What kind of things do you monitor with the Jellyfin dashboard? Would definitely be cool to put up monitoring for Transmission. I was thinking about putting up an Adguard instance to monitor it lol

I'd add backup age and size, not just status, like alert if the newest dump is older than ~26h or smaller than 1MB, a job can say success and still leave you a useless file. and disk fill with a threshold, not only the graph. learned that one the hard way, a table on my vps was getting a row every minute with no cleanup and one day the disk hit 100% and postgres just died for like 40 min, obviously nobody was looking at the dashboard right then lol. now 80% warns and 90% sends me an email, and uptime kuma checks the cert expiry from outside. I guess the dashboard is nice to look at but the stuff that matters should ping you

Yeah, for most things, a premade dashboard exists, and if it isn't fully to your liking, just customize it. Also for more professionally maintained metrics exporters like the node-exporter, there's usually an official dashboard. But learning PromQL before relying on premade stuff is probably a good idea, so you know how to adapt them to your needs

I already had influxdb+grafana setup, so it was easy to pump data to, plus I was able to then match it up with cpu temps and such from my Kubernetes nodes. I like having all my data in one place.

That said, Tasmota has native Matter support and I now have a few ESP32's controlling sockets, lights, etc., that integrate with Home Assistant.

Size is a great idea, thanks. The problem with backup age is that Backrest doesn't expose a metric for when the backup was attempted, so right now it's just checking for failure status daily. That, of course, fails if backrest doesn't attempt a backup for whatever reason. Chances of that happening, I don't know, but I'll have to look into implementing the metric (or label, I suppose) myself.

Jellyfin exporter has all kind of metrics but the ones that interest me most are active users and media played. I have a nice panel that shows who played what, when and for how long. Would also highly recommend monitoring your torrent server, that has produced all kinds of useful and interesting (to me!) metrics.

• grafana dashboards https://github.com/nodiscc/xsrv/tree/master/roles/monitoring/grafana/files
• victoriametrics alerting rules https://github.com/nodiscc/xsrv/tree/master/roles/monitoring/victoriametrics/files

What I do for that is turn it around, instead of checking for a failure I alert on the absence of a success. backrest has hooks, so on snapshot success it pings a push monitor in uptime kuma (healthchecks.io works the same), and if no ping arrives in ~26h it alerts. That way it catches the backup that never ran, which is the one that scares me the most I guess

usually add a bunch of random stuff, then forget it exists, only to check it half a year later and discover that 75% of prometheus exporters died for some reason

What kind of visualization is the Jellyfin panel? I'm curious how that data is organized. Torrent monitoring is definitely at the top of the list for Grafana priorities, would be super useful for me

Oh, that's really interesting! I couldn't find a way to find absence of success given Backrest's metrics alone, but using hooks for that seems to solve that problem well. Thanks!

Haha, that's probably what'll happen to me eventually. I've already noticed a couple data sources missing that I've had to fix. Are you monitoring home radiation?

Prometheus and Grafana on the other hand - rock solid.

Yeah, since I'm collecting useless numbers I figured I should go all out.

These two are my favourite, first shows active user timeline and second shows active playing timeline (names cut off on mobile). Ideally I would combine them together but have not found a way to do so yet, probably skills issue

Sorry for the spam but I in fact managed to join the two panels together. y-axis is users and x-axis is timeline of what they watched. Grafana unfortunately does not natively support different colour for each series block.